Neal E. Miller Is Dead at 92; Studied Brain and Behavior

By ERIC NAGOURNEY

Published: April 2, 2002

Neal E. Miller, an experimental psychologist whose conviction that the brain affects human behavior led him to conduct groundbreaking work in biofeedback, died on March 23. He was 92 and lived in a retirement community in Hamden, Conn.

Dr. Miller, who taught for years at Yale and Rockefeller University, sought to map the physiological underpinnings of the most visceral of human drives, like fear, hunger and curiosity. His studies influenced generations of researchers in behavioral medicine, neuroscience and other fields.

If many of his ideas now seem like little more than common sense -- that fear, for example, is a learned response or that people can be taught to influence basic bodily mechanisms like blood pressure -- that was hardly the case when he began advancing his theories in the 1950's and 60's. In 1997, Dr. James S. Gordon, founder of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, described the reaction to a House committee.

''In 1961,'' Dr. Gordon said, ''when Neal Miller first suggested that the autonomic nervous system could be as susceptible to training as the voluntary nervous system, that people might learn to control their heart rate and bowel contractions just as they learned to walk or play tennis, his audiences were aghast. He was a respected researcher, director of a laboratory at Yale, but this was a kind of scientific heresy. Everyone 'knew' that the autonomic nervous system was precisely that: automatic, beyond our control.''

Indeed, while Dr. Miller was described as unusually well loved by his graduate students, even they had their doubts. In an interview in 1969, when he drew wide attention for a study in which he had trained rats to control everything from their heart rate to their brain waves, he said he initially had trouble getting help.

''It was extremely difficult to get students to work on this problem,'' he said. ''And when paid assistants were assigned to it, their attempts were so half-hearted that it soon became more economical to let them work on some other problems, which they could attack with greater faith and enthusiasm.''

Biofeedback is now used fairly widely to help with a variety of medical conditions, including migraines, epilepsy and high blood pressure. Dr. Miller's peers regarded him as at least the equal of his far more famous contemporary, the behaviorist B. F. Skinner.

Researchers who want to see what the brain does as people go about their daily business -- reading, processing visual and auditory stimuli and experiencing emotions -- can now turn to a variety of sophisticated scanning devices.

Dr. Miller and the small number of other scientists who shared his interests had no such tools. For many years, they studied laboratory animals, principally rats, using reward and punishment to affect their behavior. Eventually, scientists learned to stimulate the animals' brains with electricity and chemicals to produce sensations like hunger. The early work was rudimentary, but its effects were far-reaching.

''It opened the door to working in the brain,'' said Edgar E. Coons, a former student who is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University.

Dr. Miller's psychological training was traditional, with an emphasis on Freud. After attending the University of Washington, Stanford and Yale, he went to Vienna to study psychoanalysis. As time passed, seeking to understand abstract psychological concepts like fear and anxiety, he turned his attention to measurable aspects of behavior and to the physical workings of the brain.

''You really ultimately had to understand how the brain worked if you were going to get a true understanding of behavior,'' said Dr. Edward M. Stricker, another former student and now the neuroscience chairman at the University of Pittsburgh.

Neal Elgar Miller was born in Milwaukee on Aug. 3, 1909, the son of Irving E. and Lily R. Miller. His first wife, Marion E. Edwards, died in 1997. He is survived by his second wife, Jean Shepler of Hamden; a son, Dr. York Miller of Denver; and a daughter, Sara Miller Mauch of Ypsilanti, Mich.

Over the years, Dr. Miller's regular use of lab animals aroused criticism from animal rights groups. He was a forthright defender of the practice, once arguing that if people had no right to use animals in research, then they had no right to kill them for food or clothing. Yet he acknowledged that the issue was complex.

''There is sacredness of all life,'' he said. ''But where do we draw the line? That's the problem. Cats kill birds and mice. Dogs exploit other animals by killing and eating them. Humans have to draw the line somewhere in animal rights, or we're dead.''